A Call for Change

When there is violence in a relationship, the burden falls on the survivor—often a female partner—to get help: contact a domestic violence hotline, call law enforcement, find a shelter. JAC Patrissi ’89 has long believed that another essential tool was missing: intervening sooner with those causing the harm.

Early in her career, Patrissi worked within the justice system in New England to create victim assistance services. She realized that a last-ditch reliance on the justice system to control abusive partners— through restraining orders and jail time, for example—wasn’t getting to the root of the problem. “You can’t control people out of controlling other people,” she observes.

A FOCUS ON INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION

In 2005, Patrissi founded Growing a New Heart, a consortium of leaders centered around social justice, sexual and domestic violence prevention, racial equity, and community building. Patrissi’s own work focuses on using writing, storytelling, training, and collaborative facilitation to support people and communities questioning the health and safety of their relationships. Over many years, she developed Compassionate Accountable Conversations™, a framework for engaging with individuals using abusive behaviors. It became the foundation for the largest intimate partner abuse education program in Western Massachusetts, where she lives.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, with domestic violence programs and shelters closing and rates of violence increasing, Patrissi saw the impact on her rural community. She knew there were other nations offering so-called “warm lines” to provide phone- based support to those who want to stop abusing—a different approach from hotlines geared toward emergencies.

“Since two-thirds of my career had been working with people who cause harm and people who are survivors, I was familiar with other countries’ approaches,” she says. “And there was a greater willingness to look at how we could do things differently during the pandemic.”

LAUNCHING A CALL FOR CHANGE

With support from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Patrissi set the wheels in motion to start a helpline. A Call for Change launched on April 15, 2021, with a toll-free number and website targeting 24 towns in Western Massachusetts. This anonymous and confidential partner abuse prevention helpline for adults and teens takes calls from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST and answers voicemails and emails daily.

All responders are trained in Patrissi’s Compassionate Accountable Conversations framework, which includes an array of strategies for working with individuals who are using abusive, controlling behaviors to help them develop awareness, accountability, and a plan for change.

A Call for Change now receives about 30 calls monthly, not just from Massachusetts. “In our very first week, we got calls from Europe, South America, and Zimbabwe,” Patrissi says. These calls came after people found the website through keyword searches. Calls last for up to 90 minutes, and about 60 percent are repeat contacts.

“We are cultivating perspective- taking for people using tools of dominance,” she explains. “We talk about the impact on her, on him, what that means. We want to interrupt abusers in the way that they’re thinking, their values. And we want them to come up with a plan and write it down, and then call us and tell us how it has gone.”

“We talk about the impact on her, on him, what that means. We want to interrupt abusers in the way that they’re thinking, their values. And we want them to come up with a plan and write it down, and then call us and tell us how it has gone.”

Patrissi is one of several team members fielding calls. She recently worked with a caller who was still signing into his girlfriend’s digital accounts using her passwords and tracking her activity. Another caller, who had been accused of rape, realized he had a pattern of failing to ask for consent with intimate partners. A father called for advice when his college-aged son confessed to hitting his girlfriend during an argument. Still others have reported abusing their partners for years.

“One of the real markers for success for us is when people who are actively abusing become reliably safe enough to be left,” Patrissi says. “They can accept feedback and they are a human that is reliably safe, so the survivor now feels OK to go.”

For survivors of abuse, the period after leaving tends to be the most dangerous.

A Call for Change initially faced some criticism from within the domestic violence prevention community. Patrissi says that many predicted no one would call, and if they did, it would be in the middle of causing harm. “The reaction was, ‘All you will do is give people a sense of being forgiven and redeemed, so they can hang up and cause more harm,’” she says. But that hasn’t been the pattern. People tend to call before they think they might be abusive, to try to interrupt the behavior, or after they’ve abused, to ask for advice about stopping.

Other states are replicating the model. Vermont now has The Spark, Violence Prevention Warm Line, and in California, A Call for Change is working with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color to answer calls there.

THE BRYN MAWR CONNECTION

“This is a direct outgrowth of the work I did at Bryn Mawr,” Patrissi says, adding that she feels like she has come “full circle” since graduating nearly 35 years ago. An English major, she recalls that she was always interested in storytelling.

After graduation, she received a Watson Fellowship and traveled to Australia and New Zealand to examine the impact of colonial white supremacy and misogyny on women and children and the stories they tell. She extended her travels to include nearly 40 countries, working with and learning from Indigenous peoples and sexually trafficked women and children. When she returned to the U.S., she knew that this would somehow become her life’s work.

Last August, Patrissi received the 2023 Gail Burns-Smith Award from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center and the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse. The award recognizes people who have made groundbreaking contributions to preventing sexual violence by bridging the areas of survivor work and those who have caused sexual harm.

This spring, Patrissi plans to return to campus as a guest lecturer in a course taught by social work professor Lisa Young Larance, who specializes in antiviolence intervention.